


You Were Invincible (Weren't We All Once?)

by masterofmidgets



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-30
Updated: 2011-09-30
Packaged: 2017-10-24 05:00:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/259284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterofmidgets/pseuds/masterofmidgets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Albus Dumbledore knows a few things about love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Were Invincible (Weren't We All Once?)

When he thought of it, which he did as rarely as he could and more often than he liked, it always seemed like longer than it had been.

Two months - long enough for a boy to grow a beard that made him look like a man. Long enough for the flowers his mother had planted to bloom, though she hadn't lived to see them. But not long enough for the pictures of her to fade, not long enough for the loss to lose its sting, not long enough to mend the break in his family that went deeper than bone. Not long enough to change the world.

Long enough to fall in love, if you could call it that. He always had, although if anyone had asked him he would have lied.

He had never stopped being in love with Gellert, that was the thing. Even when he had hated him - and he _had_ hated him, for so very long - that had been something seperate, though no less sincere for it. He had hated when Gellert said, what he did, what he had become, what he forced him to do. He had hated the look in Gellert's eyes when he had defeated him, flat and furious and hard. He had hated the blood Gellert left on both their hands. But even when he burned with hate for Gellert, even when he raised his wand to strike him down while Gellert hurled bitter curses at his head, that love had been there still, a sick heat in his stomach and behind his eyes that threatened to stay his hand.

In the years that came after, he often had cause to wonder if the boy he had known and loved for a hands-span of weeks had been a lie, or if it was the man who came after who had betrayed him. Betrayed them. He never did make up his mind.

But that one brief summer crystallized in his memory like a strand of perfect jewels that had to be kept hidden away. And when he thought of Gellert, he did not think of his face as he fell, or how he had looked in Nurmengard, wasted and withered, or the shame that ground away at him every time he heard his own praises lauded by those who ought to have known better.

He did not think of the sound of shattering teacups, a girl's cut-off scream, Ariana's pale face so unnaturally peaceful and still before she was buried beside his mother for all time.

When he thought of Gellert he thought of that summer, when everything had made sense, for the only time in his life. They had walked beside the river as the golden sun pooled around them, the heat shimmering on the hard-packed path, and above their heads the lonely cries of the cicadas and the swallows echoed from the green-jeweled, broad-limbed trees. At night the scent of ink and parchment had clung to him from the letters they sent back and forth, their ideas - such foolish ideas they seemed now - too big to be constrained to mere spoken words, too earth-shaking to not be recorded for the world to read.

That summer his eye had been drawn to the graceful curve of Gellert's neck, the spill of golden curls across his forehead, the broad shoulders that filled out his shirt, the long fingers that twined around his own, until he could think of little else. He would have conquered the whole world to see him smile, would have destroyed it to hear him laugh, and when he kissed him it was because there seemed no other choice left to him.

When he thought of Gellert he thought of how bright his eyes were when they talked – how soft his lips were when they kissed – how warm his skin was when they lay together in the tall summer grass. One night, the air cool and heavy from a threatening thunderstorm, they climbed out his window onto the roof and studied the stars and Gellert said he loved him, whispered the words into his skin as held him, and he believed it. 

Part of him had been saying it back ever since.

He told his students love was the most powerful magic they would ever know, and though he believed it with all his heart the words tasted of ashes in his mouth. In his mind Gellert smiled as he once smiled only for him, but his eyes were as cold as when he stood before him and shouted the spell that was his undoing, and he hoped they never knew the truth of love, and what it did.


End file.
